charon productions

Well, what can i say, In the numerous tests that i have made with a Predator AI attacking a human group, it turned out that the predator took LESS damage when he constantly moved. After killing the first soldier, he will get fired at. So until he finishes off the other 2-3 soldiers, at least 15 seconds will pass in which he will run up to a close soldier and perform the wrist attack. In that time he will take A LOT of damage from the other soldiers firing at him. Statistically he went down much faster trying to take out a number of individuals in one attack wave than when he just follows the one by one strategy. I understand your point, but the tests really showed that that strategy doesnt work to well with exactly how things turn out ingame. The AI is already very calculation intense, so to add more conditions to it, will just slow things down and to evaluate enemy pair closeness and evaluate situations against retreat conditions is complex. Also imagine a 3 player MP team situation in close formation against enemy predator AI, if he can kill all 3 players within seconds there is gonna be hard feelings for those players hehe.

I am not sure what you actually mean by killing 3 at once. If you mean the use of ranged weapons, that is left mainly to the arma engine, because there is no way to issue a command that INSTANTLY fires a TARGETTED shot at a SELECTED enemy (yes i know what i am talking about, forget about fireat and dofire). So this 3-4 man attack would probably take 20 seconds and is not what you have in mind. Engine-limitation unfortunately. In Predator 2, the predator takes out King Willy´s gang one by one in the penthouse, even though he was being fired at from all of them.

What you experience, is a very annoying issue with the module, that i tried hard to fix. My idea was to have the landing crafts enter the atmosphere from high altitude just like a spaceship and then slowly advance to the landing pos (The markers are indeed for debugging) BUT, if the a helicopter-based vehicle is being moved with a too high speed it will just tumble in a silly way and fall from the sky. I see myself forced to scrap that optimal approach planetfall curve and just place them at lets say 1000m above the landing zone, because i am loosing to much valueable time trying to fix that tumbling, which i have not been able to tackle until now. I strongly disadvise to group Predator AI, they are designed to hunt alone. Usually predators hunt in loose 3 member hunting parties only, which means there is no more than 3-5 predators on the map. The predator AI is too heavy for anything more than 7-10 predators really.

I will try to make up a strategy out of it. I dont know about the static gunners, the aiming precision is set to default values. It could be that the gunners are crew of the guns and dont get their Handledamage EHs triggered just like normal soldiers. The Arma-AI poses a big problem for the plasmacaster usage. The plasma is an explosive projectile, but if the damage value is too high, the AI will nearly never decide to use it. Thats that weird Arma-calculation that considers enemy armor values against speed and cost of ammo/target. So i had to increase the damage via the EHs and use a low damage on the actual projectile to make sure the AI uses the plasmacaster at all. There is no other, way i tried everything. I have been thinking about the friendly fire option too. Since it is an option the mission maker can decide to use it or not. Got naded and shot in the back also many times while testing this hehe. ---------- Post added at 12:56 PM ---------- Previous post was at 12:54 PM ---------- Honestly, i had to spend too much time on making them convincingly engage groups of infantry that i never even had the time to try them against vehicles. Tis will certainly be a priority in the development of an update. ---------- Post added at 12:58 PM ---------- Previous post was at 12:56 PM ---------- For some reasons the spaceships can cause desync in MP, i have not yet discovered why. The nuke thing in MP is one of the issues i mentioned where clients dont show particle effects properly. Will hopefully fix that when the time comes to look into the MP issues.

Real good points. Hadn´t tested that one, but i agree a chopper hovering above the preds should be taken down. My points was just if a tank is not actually attacking the predator, he would rather wait for the crew to get out of a tank. I will consider the chopper thing. Just like in the undead, the pred does not consider soldiers a target that are above ground as in a chopper. And if the target is too far away he should consider a closer target. If that vehicle is the only target on the map though he will continue chasing it. Due to their advanced technology, predators can find areas with human targets. They move to those areas generally, the rest is done with knowsabout. So if they knowabout any armed human, they will choose him as a target.

Honestly, i have spent hundreds of hours trying to make helicopters behave like they should in a frontline situation. Imagine an AH64 hovering behind a hill just to pop up a bit to fire a hellfire and use the terrain as cover. Since OFP, AI helicopter pilots climb up and try to strafe targets, which is silly. There is no direct way to override a helicopter pilot´s AI routines. If you disableAI "MOVE" him the helicopter could only be controlled with setvelocity commands which would never let it look like a real helicopter. So i guess there is not much i can do about the predator spaceship´s pilot AI. Concerning your 2nd question, predators do currently only focus on infantry. Icebreakr reported to me though that a predator AI once got him inside of a car hehe. I am not sure if having the predator AI take down any aircraft is such a good idea, it would make him too powerful. Designing the AI, i always had in mind what the predator´s primary motivation is, and that is to hunt and take prey. In the movies, they seem to rather enjoy getting up close and slice somebody up with the wristblades than to engage vehicles with ranged weapons. Your 3rd question, use the predator soldier for that. He will get close to the target but stay in ranged distance and engage with the plasmacaster. I added that class exactly for those cases when people need him to just fire around. Due to the hijacked AI on the predator, commands like Disable AI "MOVE" will have no effect or in worst case mess the existing AI up.

Good observation! I noticed that too, the weapon does not have the cloak texture. I had it on the fix list, but due to the time pressure to coincide this release with Icebreakr´s Lingor island release, it wasnt fixed. Besides there is literally hundreds of things still to fix in this, that´s why i would still call it alpha. Really refreshing though to hear that many people already like it and can actually play it decently to have some fun. EDIT: About the cloaked' gunship pilot. Actually the ship isnt supposed to be flown cloaked, so i have to implement an uncloaking upon entering, so that issue wont happen anymore.

Well basically to realize the Predators, you have to disable a major percentage of the engine´s control over the unit. So standard AI control approaches like FSMs synced with scripts are being used to control the predators. It is indeed similar to the Undead Mod and shares some technicalities of the basic framework, because the predators are as unusual for a military sim engine as are the undead. The biggest issue is Arma being laid out for ranged gunfights and not melee attacks or lurking 2 meters next to your enemy. So this mod looks probably so simple, but believe me it was a major challenge to get this to do what it does.

Yes they can, if his damage has reached a critical value he will lie on the floor in pain for 10 seconds, which is the time window you have to finish him off. After the 10 seconds he will initiate the wristcomputer destruct sequence, and then its time to run as fast as you can ;) If the damage is not yet critical but high, an AI predator will also try to retreat to a safe position and heal himself except he is being directly engaged then he will fight till the end.

The helicopter-based spaceship class was chosen because this is supposed to be a landing craft with the primary function to bring predators to their hunting grounds. Plane-based classes controlled by the AI are not able to make a point landing in a forest spot, which was the idea behind the "3 Predators spawn module". I dislike "Space Shuttle" landings (only at airports) for spaceships which would happen had this been a plane class. I can use the same model and make an additional predator fighter out of it, if that is of any use for anyone, but i personally didnt see one, because the predator wants to slash his prey for trophies and not fire spaceship weapons during dogfights.

It has --> Missiles

Play as the "Predator Hunter" and approach a big tree. Try several, must be the one the scripts chose internally. It is still experimental, doesnt work well on Chernarus, but on Jungle islands like Lingor or Rasoreniya. "Attachto" does not allow movement, it is based upon a different system. There is many engine limitations to this of course, the biggest being that the bounding box for trees differs enormously, so you can never tell exactly where the tree top is.

Okay this feature was quite complicated to implement of course and it might not work as intended in some cases. It´s on the improvements list. ---------- Post added at 11:05 PM ---------- Previous post was at 11:04 PM ---------- Jim Hopper lives ! :D

They are in the making Predators are independent side and have the faction "PredatorsFAC". ---------- Post added at 10:39 PM ---------- Previous post was at 10:38 PM ---------- Just as in Alien versus Predator Requiem, a plasmacaster that is not shoulder-mounted and used by a human, needs some time to power up. This was done to keep that a predator only weapon.

They DO cloak themselves fine. I was just referring to people suggesting to come up with a refractive shader a la AvP2010 or in the movies which the Arma engine does not enable to do. Player predators will also be NOT recognized by AI soldiers UNTIL the pred kills the first one. So we are talking also about true AI invisibility. The AI does not have perfect aiming on the cloaked attacking predator too, so it will often miss the predator.

yes , working on it.

While Ice is working hard and packing everything, a little teaser that shows Lingor´s beautiful rivers (and what dangers they could have) 2pOZ57O5-Wg

Does anyone know how to make particles that have a long lifetime under water? Whatever i do, as soon as a particle goes below the water surface it fades out even if the lifetime is set to 1000. I cant download this anymore : http://www.flashpoint1985.com/cgi-bin/ikonboard311/ikonboard.cgi?;act=ST;f=70;t=76056;st=0 It seems as if he found a way.

Yesterday, we have successfully tackled also the dedicated server issues where the antidote wouldnt work for the clients. So it seems as if this will have close to 100% Multiplayer compatibility. There is a handful of issues left like animations not playing because they are local to the server and projectile hits not getting registered. Basically all locality issues. Hopefully they can be tackled within the next few days. I also prepared a Single Player Mission as well as an 8 Player COOP variant of it which will be included with V0.9 The UAV should have been hard-coded. BIS probably didnt have the resources to hard-code it and decided for a scripted approach, but it really slows everything down and logically MODs with scripts especially.

Thanks Kylania, with the handle and a dofire combination it works. I was surprised about choosing a boolean value for the left hand side of the assignment operator (l-value). I am pretty sure that thats the reason why i couldnt assign any true values anymore to any setvariable commands.

Is anyone aware of an alternative usage of this command ? As kylania stated setting it to false screws up the client. I have serious issues with new FSMs being started after i use the command: The FSMs dont register setvariable changes to units which screws everything.

Really great modelling job, nice UV-Spread. Looking forward to it ! I might get motivated to finish my MSTA to balance such a nice unit: 2S19 MSTA

Very good looking !

1) Quote from the Undead documentation: 2) Please read Murray´s editing guide, search for setposASL

That is due to the center not yet defined. It should be enough to before creating the group. The list seems pretty complete, what is saw missing was: